Repent!!! (It is not optional) – Part 2
Repent!!! – The Way to Restoration
The first word of Jesus’ public ministry was not praise, love, or grace, but “Repent”. In Mark Jesus says “The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1: 15 NKJV). In Matthew, after Jesus returned from the temptation in the desert, we read the words that inaugurated His ministry: “From that time on Jesus began to preach – Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near” (Matthew 4: 17 NIV).
It is interesting to me that in both passages Jesus coupled “repent” with the Kingdom of God/heaven (Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew and the Kingdom of God in Mark, Luke, John and the Book of Acts. Matthew is making the point that the Kingdom, which is here now although not in its fulness, is heaven. We don’t have to die to enter heaven – we have the privilege of entering heaven now – “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth at it is in heaven”). And it is no coincidence that in Mark, Jesus ties the word ‘repent’ not only with the Kingdom of God but with ‘believe’. As I discovered, repent and believe (or faith) are two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other. First, lets look at why Jesus tied ‘repent with ‘Kingdom’.
What is Jesus telling us by coupling these words – repent and the Kingdom? I think in these few passages and in many other places in Scripture (e.g “Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness”), God is telling us what “to repent” really means. It means, I believe, to turn from finding my ultimate value, acceptance, comfort, connectedness in the kingdom of self in which I worship ‘me’ (and where Satan is king) to the Kingdom of God, where I will find these things (constituting life and freedom) and worship the real King, Jesus. And what I take from the ministry of Jesus is that if I have not ‘repented’ in this sense, I do not belong to Jesus, even if at some point in my past I confessed Jesus as my savior.
This is almost exactly the opposite of the sermon I heard preached last Sunday, which is probably similar to many sermons preached all over America that day. “The Good News (the Gospel) is that Christ died for you, your sins are washed away, confess Him as your savior, and you will be saved.” Period. It is not an incorrect message, it just leaves out the first word of the Gospel – “repent”.
We are all born into the kingdom of self; also known as the kingdom of the world, the kingdom of darkness, or the kingdom of death. Jesus provided an alternative: the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven; also known as the Kingdom of light, the Kingdom of life, the Kingdom of Righteousness. So there are two Kingdoms. I will call them the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of self. By the grace of God and the death and resurrection of Jesus, believers now have access to the Kingdom of God. But dual citizenship is not allowed. As Richard Owen Roberts points out “repentance is not the entry ticket into the Kingdom of God, but it is a condition of citizenship.” When we turn away from the kingdom of self and turn toward the Kingdom of God (this is why I think repentance is sometimes defined as ‘turning around’, doing a 180) we are saying to God “I no longer want to find my ultimate value and acceptance in the kingdom of self (in idols like sex, power, money, prestige, knowledge, work, family, accomplishments, etc); I want to find my ultimate value and acceptance in Jesus – I want to submit and surrender to Him; I want to live in His Kingdom to serve, obey, and follow Him. This is true repentance.
Of course, when we hear the word ‘repent’ we immediately think of sin, and so we should. “Perhaps the most popular subject of all time is the subject of sin. It is not only frequently spoken of but regularly practiced by an overwhelming majority of the world’s people” (Richard Owen Roberts, ‘Repentance’). HaHa, that’s a good one.
So here I’ll add a few more words to the ‘most popular subject of all time’. As I see it, and as I think Paul sees it, the sin in our lives can be broken down into Sin (capitol ‘S’, singular) and sins (small ‘s’, plural). Paul lays this out for us in Romans 1. “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things (some translations say ‘worshiped and served the creature’) rather than the Creator, who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1: 25). In other words, they worshiped idols, rooted in the worship of themselves. Theirs was a kingdom of self. Therefore, Paul is telling us that ‘self’ is the root of sin and evil (pride can be defined as putting ‘self’ on the throne of your life. Same thing). Throughout the Bible God makes it clear that the worship of idols is Sin. God hates Sin. In one of many, many places where Scripture speaks against idols, God tells Moses “if you then become corrupt and make any kind of idol, doing evil in the eyes of the Lord your God and provoking Him to anger, I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you this day that you will quickly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess” (Deuteronomy 4: 25, 26). Is this not what is happening in America today? We are perishing for lack of repentance.
Paul goes on to describe the consequences of Sin. “Because of this (‘this’ being the worship of the creature or created things – worship of self), God gave them over to shameful lusts…furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God…they have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil…they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Romans 1: 26 – 31). In this passage Paul is comprehensively enumerating ‘sins’. As he points out, ‘sins’ are the manifestation or by-product of ‘Sin’, the worship of self. In other words, choosing to live in the kingdom of self. Self-worship, aka living in the kingdom of self, is the root (Sin) and the fruit of that root is all the other ‘sins’ and evil.
Repentance is a change of mind that results in a change in belief and behavior. The fruit of repentance is a more righteous life, a life in which we sin less. Sin and repentance are closely coupled.
Ok, that makes sense to me. But I can’t just wake up one morning and say, in my own power “I want to repent”. There is one more aspect of Sin that needs to be mentioned to understand repentance, as I see it. It is this: the basic, most fundamental human need that transcends and underlays every dimension of our humanity is the need for acceptance, value, and connection. God made us this way for Himself. We are created to find our needs met in Him. But as we read in Genesis 3, Adam rejected God, rejected self (shame), feared rejection, and rejected others. This spirit of rejection, including the fear of rejection, devaluing, and disconnection has driven the human race ever since. We turn to idols, counterfeit Gods as Tim Keller calls them, to find this acceptance and value that each human being so desperately needs to live. It is sad, but true (and certainly true in my life) that most people do not turn to God first to fulfill these needs; after all, we inherited this spirit of rejection, part of which is the rejection of God, and the notion of unregenerate human beings that “I can do it on my own” – pride. And so Sin is a part of our lives from the day we were born. We find our value in one or more of the almost infinite number of idols that the human race has created and release evil into the world. But we are so deceived, that even when it begins to become apparent that the idol is not going to provide fulfillment but death and destruction instead, we cling to that idol believing that if we commit to it a little bit more things will turn around and we will be ok.
Why are we so idolatrous? (I suppose Calvin and his followers would say “I told you – we are totally depraved”. True, but is that the whole story?). I don’t think so. Most of us have been wounded: abused, devalued, dehumanized, rejected, abandoned, belittled, beat up, or deeply shamed at some point in our younger lives. Here are some actual examples: the woman whose father often threw her down the stairs when she was young. The 6-year old girl who was sexually abused by a neighbor and never was allowed to talk about it. She suffered horrifying dreams well into her adult years. The boy who was beat up daily in the fourth grade on the school playground on his walk home from school because he was the new boy in the class. The 60-year old woman whose mother committed suicide by shooting herself in the abdomen when the woman was a little girl because she didn’t want to grow old. The 60-year old woman suffered intestinal bleeding her whole adult life. The woman whose husband sexually abused their young daughter when the mom was out of the house, but who discovered the abuse when she got home and has lived with a crushing sense of shame and guilt for years. These are real situations. There are as many of these stories as there are grains of sand on the beach or stars in the sky. These wounds go deep; sometimes they have been buried in our hearts and we are no longer aware that they exist.
These wounds do two things to us: First, they are powerful drivers to find our value and acceptance in something outside of ourselves. We will be valued, we will be accepted, we will overcome the terrible pain and rejection, and we will do it in our own power. And so we enter the kingdom of self and begin to live a life of Sin. In my life I compensated for these wounds with scholastic and athletic performance and later with more destructive behaviors. Others turn to more dangerous ways of dealing with the pain, for example drugs or alcohol, other addictions like food; they can become angry, abusive, or violent.
Second, these wounds open a door for Satan to indwell our hearts. This demonic infiltration constantly fills us with shame, guilt, and a voice that repeats over and over in various versions of the same theme – “you are not good enough, you are unworthy”. And out of these choices – survival really for most of us – we harm ourselves, those we love and who love us, and release evil into the world. The idols that we turn to tell us “we will totally fulfill you, but you must totally surrender to me”. When we ‘totally surrender’ we worship the idol and self; not Jesus. The kingdom of self has a king – every Kingdom has a king. It just isn’t us, no matter how much we think it is. The king of the kingdom of self is Satan and we are enslaved to him. It makes no difference how often we have accepted or decided for Jesus, how often we attend church and confess our sins. If the root of Sin, which is self, is untouched, if we have not repented, we do not belong to Him. Are we totally depraved? Well, yes. But there is grace.
In the Kingdom of God there is healing. I don’t see how a wounded person (and who isn’t) is going to get to the point where they would say “OK, Jesus I will give all of these idols up to live with you” without these wounds being healed first. We all believe that these idols have kept us alive, even if we have been deceived. I believe that healing is an integral part of my choosing the kingdom, which is why Jesus made such a big deal about healing and deliverance.
And so, because of our basic Sin nature, the spirit of rejection inherited from Adam, and the woundedness that most of us have experienced, we Sin and we commit sins. We look for and find our value, acceptance, and connectedness to others in the world in idols. We are very good idolators, and for most of us, we can’t imagine life without our own particular idol or no matter how much we want to live life without that idol, we cannot. We are not free.
Jesus promises us healing. As we cry out to Jesus for the healing our our spiritual and emotional wounds, he promises to meet us. Something happens. We are given the grace to enter His Kingdom manifested in the confidence, the trust, the belief that we are on the right path, even if we are not fully healed in that moment. And as Scripture says “We are born again”. But does everyone who cries out and enters the Kingdom get this spiritual and emotional healing? Does everyone with depression, anger, unforgiveness, shame, etc. get healed? I am not wise enough to answer this question definitively. Who is, except Jesus? In the little time that I have been around healing prayer I have seen incredible spiritual and emotional healing. I have seen some healed (or who have claimed healing) immediately. I have seen some, touched by Jesus, begin to heal, and then continue to be healed over days, weeks, even years. But, I believe that when we truly repent and enter the Kingdom of God, we begin to heal in some fashion from these deep wounds. That healing can continue for the rest of our lives and beyond. But healing begins now, because ‘now’ we have entered heaven.
What about physical healing? Jesus promises physical healing in the Kingdom of God as well. I know (and you know) that not everyone who is physically sick gets healed. I have wrestled with this question in my mind for years – are all who enter the Kingdom of God, who truly repent, physically healed? Good question. So, here is my imperfect answer. More would be healed if more of us truly repented. But we live in a fallen world. The Kingdom of God is here, but not perfectly. There is still the suffering, pain, anguish, and death associated with disease like cancer. Kingdom people and non-kingdom people alike suffer and die. But I have seen this: some Kingdom people do get physically healed and some of these healings are nothing short of miraculous. Some Kingdom people do not get physically healed in this world, but the presence of Christ in the midst of their suffering and the suffering of their families is powerful. In His Kingdom, there is spiritual, emotional, and physical healing and wholeness. Period. It might not take the form I expect or want. It might not occur in the time framework I pray for. But it will occur. My job, as directed by the Holy Spirit, is to pray, expecting this physical healing. And for my prayers to be effective, for my prayers to be answered, I must be a repentant, Kingdom man because answered prayer is conditional: it is dependent upon my being known by Christ. He is the mediator. He will not know me in this way unless I am His subject, living in His Kingdom.
Now we are ready to look at repentance again. When we hear the Good News preached, when the Holy Spirit touches us with Godly sorrow at how our Sin (sins) breaks God’s heart, and when we confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, we can be brought by God to a place where we are required to make a decision about which Kingdom we will live in. As I said, I think it is entirely possible to confess Jesus as Savior, but refuse to abandon my life in the kingdom of self. It is just too comfortable, too secure, too exciting, too addictive, or too much fun to give up. This then, is a life without repentance. And it is a life without Jesus.
We belong to Jesus when we have decided to live in the Kingdom of God. We enter that Kingdom by choice. Scripture is clear – we need to chose, we have responsibility. Jesus clearly tells us to store our treasure in Heaven, not in the world; to chose the right gate, the one that leads to life. Jesus tells us to first seek His Kingdom and His Righteousness; to ask, seek, and knock and the door (to the Kingdom will be opened). And Jesus tells us in Revelation 3 that He will knock but we must open the door. Implicit in His command to ‘repent’ is our role in this decision. This decision must be solemn, serious, and public. We must clearly understand what we are leaving behind – certain friends, behaviors, types of books and movies, pornography, drugs, ways of talking, and even ways of thinking. We have decided – these things must go. We have changed our mind about what is valuable in our life. But more importantly, we have changed our mind about where we will find our value and acceptance. We will look for, relentlessly seek, and cry out for righteousness and holiness in Jesus. He will be our value, our acceptance, and our connectedness to others. When we choose the Kingdom of God, we choose to place ourselves under the authority of the King. The Kingdom is not a democracy; we surrender and submit to Him joyfully and obediently.
Repentance is a gift from God. It is pure grace, but ‘we’ have to repent. The dimensions of repentance in more detail and God’s grace in particular are the topics of ‘Repent!!! (It is not Optional) – Part 3.